Jaslabs: High performance Software

By Justin Silverton

From a recent Microsoft announcement:

“We will love to put that kind of agreement in place with anyone who distributes Linux software, Red Hat, whoever else,” Steve Ballmer told India’s Economic Times in an interview published on Thursday.

Ballmer, on a visit to India, said while he believed software would be increasingly downloaded and managed off the Internet, it would still also be sold through a more traditional chain.

“I think some software will be bought, some will be subscribed to and some will be monetized through advertising,” Ballmer said in the interview in New Delhi.

“I would say we are moving to a world where there is a lot more electronic distribution. It is a new style of software, not the old-style distributed electronically.”

First, Microsoft was against linux and the open source community.  Then, they decided to support the SUSE distro through Novell.  Now They are supporting them all?

It’s very interesting that they have made all of these announcements within a couple of months from the release of Vista, the new Microsoft operating system (Retail Versions are set to be released on January 30. 2007).

One of the main strengths of any open source project is that as long as it is under a license such as the GNU, it can never be closed to the public.  There will always be some form of the source code available to view, develop, and use.  A strategy that corporations seem to be following is that if they can buy out (hire) the main developers (Microsoft has done this in the past), they can basically stop development of that project and remove their competitor from the market (even if it’s free) 

A new strategy has also started to emerge in the past couple of weeks by Oracle (and now Microsoft).  By directly competing with companies that are supporting/distributing products based on open source, those companies might lose business to the likes of a larger, more powerful company (Redhat’s stock dropped shortly after Oracle’s announcement).

By Justin Silverton

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that they have taken an interest in the php language and would be working closely with the Zend corporation to make it more efficient and scalable on the windows platform.

Now, Microsoft has announced that they will also co-develop a version of linux with Novell (based on the SUSE distribution).

In a Recent Article from InfoWorld:

“Microsoft will offer sales support for Suse Linux and will co-develop with Novell in the areas of virtualization, Web services management, and document format compatibility between Microsoft Office and Open Office. The collaboration will make it easier for users to run both Suse Linux and Microsoft Windows on their computers.”

At first glance, this sounds like a great thing. Microsoft will now be supporting the open source community. This could bring: better driver support, interoperability with office formats (and other proprietary formats), and even more wide-spread usage at the enterprise level (large companies might see Microsoft as a more viable support option).

We also might see something I have been wanting for awhile now: A good desktop distribution. Linux works great in a server environment, but I have had many issues when attempting to use it as a desktop machine (driver support..or the lack of is one of the biggest problems).

The downside of this new interest is the fact that Microsoft is still a corporation. A corporation has only one thing in mind: making money. One of the main objectives here is to get back the marketshare that is slowly being lost to linux servers. Looking at their past history (Steve Ballmer once said that the GNU is a “viral license”) leads me to believe that they will try anything in their power to control the one thing they cannot buy.

By Justin Silverton

Recently, there was an interview with the co-founder of zend technologies, Andi Gutmans. 

Here are some interesting questions addressed:

“InfoWorld: Why do you think PHP is the most popular?

Gutmans: I think because of our very, very strong focus on the Web. We’ve always been the most efficient when it comes to developing Web applications. And also it’s a very, very easy language to pick up. So you don’t have to have to be a software engineer or a computer science graduate to use PHP. I often say that PHP is the Visual Basic of the Web. You can just be kind of an ad hoc developer, no real formal training, and be very, very efficient. ”

I’ve often wondered the same thing myself.  Why is PHP so popular?  Wikipedia states that it is currently the 3rd most popular language on the web.  It might have to do with it’s ease of use.  Because it’s type-less and has many web-related features built-in, a beginner can easily pick it up and start coding applications. 

It also might have to do with the nature of the open source community.  The fact that PHP is open source means that when you use it to build your applications, you aren’t at the mercy of any one corporation.  The problem with utilizing proprietary technologies built by large corporations is that when they change the standards, you are forced to comply (and could possibly lose support).  Open source means a community of support that could be around much longer than the the previous version.

“InfoWorld: What is your take on the Oracle announcement last week about supporting Red Hat Linux?  Do you think this is a death knell for Red Hat?

Gutmans: I’m not sure. If Oracle succeeds, I don’t know if it’s a death knell. I think still a lot of vendors are going to prefer kind of the best-of-breed vendor for Linux. But [Red Hat] could lose some business, especially the Oracle business. [Red Had has] got some pricing pressure… There’s obviously another option, which is that Oracle is just trying to drive down the price [of Red Hat stock]. And maybe this is a one- to two-year plan to actually acquire Red Hat. ”

Oracle has shown the volatility of a business based on open source (Redhat’s stock price dropped shortly after the announcement of their interest in the distro).  Since Redhat’s core business is based on something any company could do, a larger company (one with more resources and money) has a chance of beating them at their own game.

Redhat isn’t gone yet, however.  They still have a lot going for them.  Many of the features and additions found in the latest redhat distribution are created by the developers hired by the corporation, which will take awhile for oracle to replicate.

By Justin Silverton

PHP 5.2.0 has officially been released!

Here is a list of important changes/updates:

• array/HashTable copying has been optimized
• require_once() and include_once() have been optimizedby eliminating fopen(3) on
  second usage.
• Optimized request shutdown sequence. Restoring ini directives now iterates
  only over modified directives instead of all.
• Improved crypt() on win32 to be about 10 times faster and to have friendlier
  license.
• Improved performance of the implode() function on associated arrays.
• Improved performance of str_replace() when doing 1 char to 1 char or 1 char
  to many chars replacement.
• Optimized access to FastCGI environment variables by using HashTable
  instead of linear search.
• Fixed bug #39034 (curl_exec() with return transfer returns TRUE on empty
  files).
• Fixed bug #38377 (session_destroy() gives warning after
  session_regenerate_id()).

Many Other issues have been fixed with this new release.

Download is available here

By Justin Silverton

It has been announced by Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans that the latest version of PHP (5.2) will be released This Thursday (November 2nd).

Some new features that will be included:

• significant performance improvements
• Security extensions
• better AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) backing with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) extensions

“What [the security extension] really focuses on is allowing developers to write secure apps in a much easier fashion by providing tools to do so,”

Gutmans said. PHP 6.0 focuses on internationalization and Unicode support. A pre-release of version 6.0 is expected in December with the general release planned for 2007. Questioned about the differences between PHP and the also-popular Ruby on Rails platform, Gutmans said PHP is more accessible to nonprogrammers than Ruby.

One of the more interesting comments made in this interview was the improved support for the windows platform (more info on this Here). This will include 12 new patches that are supposed to improve the ovarall performance of php.
More of this interview can be found Here